Alexis
Role: Bridge between past and present; the bearer of the house’s history
Function: Delivers the information that recontextualizes everything; carries the weight of double discovery
Character Sketch
Alexis found them both.
This fact — which will emerge gradually, not in exposition — is the load-bearing fact of the film’s second and third acts. Years apart, in the same basement room, Alexis found two deceased family members. The specific circumstances of both deaths are not the film’s focus. What matters is the accumulated weight of those discoveries and what they have done to the way Alexis inhabits her own family’s history — and their house.
Alexis is not broken. She is sealed. She has built an almost perfect membrane around the specific knowledge she carries, and she functions inside it. She is composed, sometimes warm, sometimes carefully flat. She knows how to talk around the thing without talking about it. She has done this for years.
What she has not anticipated is Kendrie.
Wants vs. Needs
Want: For the house to be occupied, functional, and belonging to someone who will be good in it. She has some investment in Kendrie and Charlize succeeding there — she needs to believe the house can hold life again.
Need: To tell someone. The weight of carrying the double discovery — quietly, correctly, without making it about herself — is something she has never fully set down. Kendrie, who absorbs without judgment, is perhaps the first person who can receive it.
Relationship to the House
Complex and deeply ambivalent. She does not fear the house the way the Uncle does — she is too intimate with it for fear. What she feels is something closer to a specific kind of love that has been complicated: you love someone for years and then something happens and you can no longer think of them without thinking of the thing, and the thinking of the thing does not cancel the love but saturates it.
She visits the house. She does not stay overnight.
The Double Discovery
Two family members. Same room. Years apart. Different circumstances (left deliberately vague in these notes — to be determined in script development). Alexis was the one who found them both.
The statistical near-impossibility of this is something she has had to live with without being able to discuss without it sounding like a story. It does not sound like a story to Kendrie.
Relationship to Characters
Kendrie: Feels Kendrie receive her in a way she did not expect. The moment she decides to tell Kendrie the full history is the film’s emotional hinge.
Charlize: Respects her. Is more careful with her. Charlize’s practical rationalism is familiar — Alexis has deployed it herself — but she knows where it breaks.
Melissa: Long-standing love, shared history, the particular closeness of people who have held the same family grief without ever fully discussing it.
Uncle: Understands his position completely. Does not judge him.
Arc
Alexis does not have a dramatic arc in the conventional sense — she is largely already through her own. What the film gives her is a small, significant movement: from sealed to opened. She shares what she’s carried. She does not collapse. She is, marginally, lighter.
Visual Notes
- Often shot in medium — not as close as Kendrie, not as wide as Charlize
- Has a quality of stillness that is different from Kendrie’s: Kendrie is still because she’s listening; Alexis is still because she has decided
- The scene where she tells Kendrie the history should be shot with minimal cutting — hold on both faces
Performance Notes
- Do not play her as traumatized in any legible, performed way
- The weight is in what she doesn’t say, not what she does
- When she laughs, make it real — she has a life; the grief does not cancel her
- The moment of telling Kendrie should feel like setting something down, not like breaking open